The Book on Fire (22 page)

The citizens carried me to this tomb. I
was given the burial of a princess. But I could not sleep. My work was not yet
done. So I donned another blue cocoon, wrapping it around my spirit. Twice I
have died, once at the hand of my father, once at the hands of my sisters. And
someday I will die again, the death I crave, the final death, which will allow
me to sleep. For centuries I’ve been stalking my death.

****

Zeinab
looked down into her coffee cup. She looked up. “So you see, Balthazar. You
see, I know what a burning book becomes, in the heart.”

“You released the books. The books on my shelf.”

“Yes. I released them, knowing they would return. The books you
gathered around the world, from the continents where they had alighted. The
books you returned to Alexandria. You did not understand your task, but you
knew the books, knew they were meant to be together, to come home. I’ve been
waiting for you, Balthazar, waiting and waiting, burning books to keep myself
awake.”

“How did you know I had them?”

“I didn’t.”

“But you asked—”

“I asked that question of every visitor to this city. You were the
one who answered.”

“So now what?”

“‘I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it till it
blazes.’ The day’s not over. I have hope for you, book thief.”

****

This
is what it comes down to: a few bright moments, hot in the hand, rising to the
stars. And what then?

I remembered the book she had burned, the book from my holy shelf,
which I had only read because it had been freed by her hands, how many
centuries before. But though I knew the words by heart, could place my
fingertips, like a lutenist, against the chords of its phantom spine, the
memory of the book was entirely usurped by its demise, the afterimage of the
burning book falling into the sea. And certain sparks had fled upward,
obliterated in the darkling sky. In my mind’s eye I followed their traces,
trying to read the bright scars whose dotted arcs on my inner eyelid were
composed as much of my stuttering consciousness as of light (as the words you
read are only rudimentarily ink). Surely the paths they took were not random,
but informed by the words they had been. Words now ash.

What happens when a book is burned? The only copy in existence,
unmemorized, so the words are gone, dispersed into the sea and the dust. The
words have vanished, and the beautiful pages have vanished, but something
remains. Where does story lie? Once the words have been erased, the story
resides along our bones, remains tethered within us like a beast, which we can
listen to, translating the animal cries, giving the story breath, wrapping it
once again in a cloak of words to make it visible. And this act, the act of
embracing the djinn, raising the dead, is sacred. But in the spaces between the
words, the space after the burning of the book and before the telling, where does
the story live, and what is its nature? Seed, swelling; or flesh, worm-ridden?
Icon or architecture? Wordless, in us, in our deepest parts, the stories
crouch, unborn. They make us. We live by them, we are host to them. We are
maker and made, ship and spark, insane, blind, wounded, sounded, singing.

****

Zeinab
and I emerged from the cemetery into a changing city. And now began the
strangest journey I have made in any land, a journey as evening fell, my
companion a ghost. As thieves, we are always taking the alternate routes,
across rooftops, through side alleys and shady quarters, but now, with Alexandria at war, even these zones were treacherous, and we had to move with extra
stealth. I led her to an empty villa and we crept up a faulty staircase, the
steps crumbling away even as we mounted them. At the top we exited through a
window and pulled ourselves onto the roof, and looked out across the cityscape.
Smoke lifted here and there like tall blue palms. On the rooftops to the west,
snipers crouched, lone figures in somber garments, backs to parapets, nests of
bullets like brass eggs beside them. As we watched, they angled their weapons
through crenellation and gashed walls, sighting carefully into the streets
before touching forth their venom. We could not see the fruit of their labor,
but saw them draw swiftly back to cover, take a pull from a bottle, reload.

Beneath us the battles raged, groups of boys in holiday finery
rallying and retreating past carcasses of sheep and men, books and knives in
their hands, calling out the ninety-nine names of God, their ninety-nine
favorite titles. They huddled behind corners, behind art nouveau gratings and
toppled wardrobes and barricades of books, into which bullets thudded, spewing
paper dust. We heard the tish of books thrown through windows. Glass like salt
in the streets. Citizens of all ages ran through the streets with armloads of
books, wearing the mask of panic and glee common to looters everywhere.

Whispering to each other, we mapped our route, sketching zigzags
through the air, tapping the villas and mosques we’d step across to get to the
Kanisa Prometheus. Then we set out, in an artificial twilight of gunsmoke and
plaster dust, teetering along tram wires and tree limbs, moving through houses,
entering a window on the third floor and exiting through a skylight, then
leaping across an alleyway. Zeinab was a blue cat beside me, so silent I had to
will myself to notice her.

As we tiptoed over a tram wire, battalions surged from either end of
the street below, brandishing banners and butcher knives, books and scimitars.
The slogans and verses they yelled, distinct at the outset, became a general
clamor, the superb joy of young men hankering for blood. The clang as they came
together was louder than I’d anticipated. Sparks and dust and scraps of paper
seethed over us. But then the battle settled to grunts of effort, the surprise
of the wounded, bodies joining in embraces, some falling and trampled, some
stumbling into alleyways, clutching bellies or eyes. We moved on.

The city we passed through was changed and changing, new vistas of
the sea where buildings had hemmed the gaze, sudden thoroughfares where
buildings had fallen. Interior became exterior, so we looked into a salon,
complete with framed portraits and porcelain figurines, teacups and sliced
cake, perched at the edge of a precipice where a façade had fallen away, the
carpet draped across the edge, one chair in gilt smithereens below.

We came to the church and mosque in Moharram Bey, through whose
windows Zeinab had tossed the burning books. From a rooftop vantage across the
street, we watched as the congregations boiled out the doors. Priest and imam
fought toward each other like rival princes, and finally met, swinging rosaries
like bicycle chains, cassocks ripped, beards glossy with blood, each wielding a
book. A nun, stabbed in the belly, lay in a gutter clutching her cross and
yelling as if in labor. A man smashed an icon of St. Horus across his
neighbor’s bald pate, splintered dragon tooth and horse hoof spraying. Bodies
lay bleeding on prayer mats, heads angled southeast. A woman gnawed the
tattooed cross from another’s wrist and grinned through a mouthful of bloody
tendons. In a font babies lay immersed in the fluids of their opened bodies.
Housewives dropped books from balconies onto heads, their victims swaying a
moment before splashing headlong into puddles. Books lay in the puddles,
swollen to twice their normal size. Torn leaves were stuck to bodies with water
and blood. We moved on.

On the outskirts of Anfushi we climbed once more the minarets of the
Jamiat Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi. This time I did not slip. Curled in the copper
moons, we smoked, looking across a cityscape no longer static. Darkness had
entirely fallen, but no stars looked down on Alexandria this night. The city at
war was as pretty as a thunderstorm, with pockets of flickering brightness and
seams of roiling ink. The chants of the militants echoed, primal and enticing.
Tracers bent like thin rainbows out to sea. We smoked three cigarettes each,
flicking the matches back and forth, while windows and balconies blossomed, and
we watched falling girls on fire, and falling lovers clutching each other,
their descent slower than gravity warranted, as if buoyed by their burning
garments. In a nearby apartment, a mother comforted her daughter with a
lullaby. To that gentle soundtrack, we watched a skirmish in Midan Saad
Zaghloul, silent from this distance, elegant as ballet, the parties chasing
each other down to the seafront and back to the Trianon, banners rippling,
blades winking.

Zeinab snapped her cigarette toward the sea, then pocketed the
matches and swung down. I followed.

Near the Kanisa Prometheus, we descended through a vacant stairwell
and crept through the alleys. But rounding a corner we halted, suddenly
vertiginous. As though endowed with x-ray vision, we stood looking through the
walls of the church into the sacristy. The curtain had been blown away,
revealing the altar. On shards of wall here and there a few icons hung askew.
Someone had shot St. Isaiah between the eyes. The dome had collapsed onto the
badminton court in a heap of rubble, but the armchairs, palled with plaster
dust, still lay about, beneath a ceiling of gun smoke and rain cloud. The bats
had flown.

And as we watched, from behind the altar emerged a fat ghost
decorated with illuminated fragments, limping, blood soaking through the white
dust on his vestments. In each hand he bore a glass filled with dark liquid.

“Welcome, welcome,” Abuna Makarios bellowed, hearty as ever. “Don’t
mind the clutter, we’ll soon have this swept up.” And he handed us our drinks.

“Are ... are you all right?” I faltered.

“As it happened, I was arranging my bookshelves when the bomb came
in. The books are blown to bits, but I escaped with a few paper cuts, nothing
to fret about. Have seats, don’t let me keep you standing.” He slapped at an
armchair and vanished within a cloud of dust.

So we sat in the ruins of our church, sipping wine and karkadeh,
while bullets and hurled books riffled over our heads. We could hear the
clicking of magazines being changed in the next alley, and the screams and
prayers of the wounded. The battles surged along the isthmus and subsided into
Mansheyya. A man walked slowly out of an alley carrying a book drenched in
blood, passed through the church without seeing us, and disappeared into
another alley.

As night rose, other thieves emerged. First Nura, fireworks and
tracer bullets racing on the surfaces of her huge eyes. She kissed our cheeks,
her lips dry as fingertips, crosses knocking against our chests, then took a
seat. Koujour next. Makarios handed out drinks and cigarettes. He brought forth
a platter of day-old communion bread, ash-dusted, arranged around saucers of
tahina and spiced cheese, and we ate without speaking while the gunfire rattled
and grenades popped. The fighting seemed to have moved into Kom al-Dikka,
though there was sporadic gunfire nearby as pockets of resistance were cleaned
out.

I asked Koujour about Hala and the twins. He told me he had sent
them into his studio with a supply of food and books, and locked and painted
out the door so it would be invisible to looters. He had left all the money,
with a basket of fruit and paperbacks, on a side table beside the door. Nura
had escaped the mobs by joining them, chanting with this procession and that
through the streets, till she was close enough to the Kanisa to slip away.

As she was talking, Karim, normally so ebullient, staggered into the
circle. Thinking he’d been wounded, I sprang up, caught his shoulders, and
lowered him into a chair.

“What is it?” Nura asked, voice barely audible.

He looked around at us, the muscles of his neck bulging and writhing
as if he strained against a harness. Bringing his hands to his face as though
to grip the words, he tore them suddenly away and in a terrible broken bark
shouted, “Amir, Amir!” the name deteriorating into retching.

“No! Oh no!” Nura knelt beside him, embracing an arm. We crushed
round him, laying our hands and cheeks on his seizing body, for the minutes
while his spasms diminished, though his cries of grief continued, as they
continued throughout the city. Makarios helped him hold a glass of arak, as one
holds a cup for a child, and he sipped awkwardly, alcohol mingling with tears
and ash on his chin. At last he scoured his face with his shirttail and told us
what had happened.

“We were in the catacombs when the fighting began, so we heard
nothing till we came out. Then we saw the gangs entering houses, burning. I
wanted to go back underground and wait till it was over. Amir ... Why, Amir,
why? Why?” Again we waited till his shouting diminished. Karim looked around
blankly. When he spoke again his voice emerged too loud. “He had to go to his
secrets, of course. I begged him not to. As we got near his apartment we could
see it was on fire. I tried to hold him, but he can be slippery. He ran up the
stairs. The doorway was on fire. He didn’t look back. I shouted to him, but the
fire roared. The stairwell filled with smoke, and I had to go back down. From
the street I saw him at the balcony, emptying boxes into the air. He was on
fire, but didn’t seem to notice. He rushed inside, came out with handfuls of
letters and photographs, tossed them down. I called to him. I shouted that I’d
catch him, that I could put out the fire, but he didn’t hear me. Or wouldn’t
hear me. The secrets rained down. Finally the fire swallowed him. Look,
though.” He pulled from the watch pocket of his tuxedo jacket something brown,
oval. A leaf, I thought, then saw the passage of a tracer across its surface.
“This fell,” Karim said, his voice too soft now. “This fell. It’s all I have
left. More precious than any emerald. I will build a shrine. It will lie on a
cushion of lavender velvet, under glass, on a marble pedestal. I will polish it
with silk. I will endow a feast day in his name. Only the chosen will be
permitted to look through it.”